Review: Locklands, by Robert Jackson Bennett

Sancia, Clef, and Berenice have gone up against plenty of long odds in the past. But the war they’re fighting now is one even they can’t win. This time, they’re not facing robber-baron elites, or even an immortal hierophant, but an entity whose intelligence is spread over half the globe—a ghost in the machine that uses the magic of scriving to possess and control not just objects, but human minds.
To fight it, they’ve used scriving technology to transform themselves and their allies into an army—a society—that’s like nothing humanity has seen before. With its strength at their backs, they’ve freed a handful of their enemy’s hosts from servitude, even brought down some of its fearsome, reality-altering dreadnaughts. Yet despite their efforts, their enemy marches on—implacable. Unstoppable. Now, as their opponent closes in on its true prize—an ancient doorway, long buried, that leads to the chambers at the center of creation itself—Sancia and her friends glimpse a chance at reaching it first, and with it, a last desperate opportunity to stop this unbeatable foe. But to do so, they’ll have to unlock the centuries-old mystery of scriving’s origins, embark on a desperate mission into the heart of their enemy’s power, and pull off the most daring heist they’ve ever attempted.

"There is no dancing through a monsoon". Robert Jackson Bennett's Locklands aims higher than ever and crafts a tale of gigantic scope, a novel about transhumanism, choices, and sacrifices. Set eight years after Shorefall's devastating conclusion, it follows the original cast as they make a new society, something so vastly different from everything that came before, a new way of being. They fight for a chance to survive, battling against the ancient being that they awakened in the past, and finding unexpected allies. It's all-out war, vast and desperate, the very surface of the earth altered.

And yet at its heart, it's also a quiet story of loss and despair, about what a single man can accomplish in the face of a personal tragedy. It's terrible to imagine that much of the pain and catastrophies suffered by humanity were done in the course of attempting to right a wrong. Against the backdrop of the war mysteries are revealed, and the tragedy at the center of it all pulls at heartstrings in its simplicity.

Sancia and Berenice suffer through a trial of their own, as they're forced to face the consequences of what happened in the first book. They're an older couple now, they've been together for years, and they're comfortable in their skin and their love and in the ties that bind them; they know each other, inside and out, but darkness looms ahead, and choices that must be made.

The epilogue is masterful, tying all the final threads together to form a heartbreaking conclusion that nonetheless is filled with hope.

Locklands is the perfect finale to an imaginative trilogy.

✨ 5 stars